Fresh Fiction just reviewed Sherlock Holmes and the Return of the Whitechapel Vampire by Dean P. Turnbloom

Reviewed by Monique Daoust
Posted October 15, 2015

Mystery Historical

Sherlock Holmes is now a country squire who has retired to Sussex to tend to his bees and write monographs. He hadn’t written to his friend Dr. Watson in a few months, so when the post brings news from Holmes, Watson is pleasantly surprised. But Holmes has more than a few banalities to tell his old comrade: bodies have been surfacing near the coast of Newfoundland, drained of blood, but there’s no trace of a shipwreck. Holmes fears their old nemesis, Baron Barlucci, after laying low for over two decades, is up to no good again. Barlucci is a painful thorn in Holmes’ side. The Baron is the only villain the great detective hasn’t captured, and of course, Dr. Watson must sail with Holmes to Manhattan Island, where more bodies have been found.

SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE RETURN OF THE WHITECHAPEL VAMPIRE is not the pastiche I thought it might have been, but the almost real deal. Right from the opening paragraphs, I was overjoyed because I felt I was reading a brand new Conan Doyle mystery. Being a die-hard fan of the original, I then became wary: could a modern author be successful in this tremendous undertaking? The answer is a resounding yes! SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE RETURN OF THE WHITECHAPEL VAMPIRE is more than an homage to Conan Doyle: Mr. Turnbloom essentially captures everything that is Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson but makes it his own, without the reader ever having the impression of the author “trying”; never does the author endeavour to copy, but he in fact prolongs the formidable legacy of Conan Doyle. Mr. Turnbloom’s writing is eloquent and vivid, he captures the early twentieth century as accurately as a photograph, the tone is impeccable, the dialogues and the banter are entirely evocative of Conan Doyle’s, and Holmes and Watson are exactly how they should be. The pacing is perfect, and the story is as gripping as any Sherlock Holmes book.

If I have one regret it’s not knowing that SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE RETURN OF THE WHITECHAPEL VAMPIRE was the third book in this series, and while obviously this instalment can be read as a standalone, the previous books figure now on my to-be-read-pile because it is simply brilliant. SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE RETURN OF THE WHITECHAPEL VAMPIRE is absolutely splendid from beginning to end, and should be read by anyone who hasn’t had enough of Sir Arthur’s great detective, and everybody who likes a good mystery!

David B. Schlosser is an author of award-winning fiction and non-fiction, and an editor of award-winning fiction and non-fiction.

I frequently hear from writers who are interested in a manuscript review or editing services, or who want to pitch an agent or publisher, and they tell me their book is 200 or 425 or howevermany pages long.

When I’m feeling indulgent and patient, I’ll spend some time explaining why I don’t care how many pages their manuscript is – and why they shouldn’t, either. What counts is the number of words in the manuscript, because that’s how “long” the work actually is.

Back in the day of Royals and Selectrics, “page” meant “page.” It meant, “About 250 words.”

Today, “page” means something so utterly removed from the typewriter days that it literally defies definition.

And if we’re talking about e-books, those things don’t even have pages.

As anyone who’s written (or graded) a high school or college term paper since the early 1990s can tell you, by tinkering with margins, fonts, line spacing – even leading, tracking, and kerning – an author can make a page whatever the author wants it to be.

That’s not necessarily what everyone in the publishing industry accepts “a page” to be.

To illustrate the difference between “how many pages” and “how long” a manuscript is, I altered several common formatting variables in a novel manuscript. You can see the details in the rest of this post, but the bottom line is this:

The difference between what two well-intentioned people mean when they talk about “number of pages” can vary as much as 185%.

Font

Typefaces are an embarrassment of riches that cause a lot of embarrassment. Different word processors default to different fonts. You can choose among hundreds of fonts. Fonts that are easy to read on a computer screen (sans serif fonts) are not as easy or comfortable to read on paper as serif fonts.

Without changing anything in “how long” the manuscript is (same number of words, same page breaks for chapters, same headers), I altered the font and font size of the manuscript to show the impact of several popular fonts and font sizes on “how many pages” there are in the manuscript.

The difference in number of pages based only on changing fonts and font sizes varied from 316 to 492 – a variance of 45% from the average number of pages in this spreadsheet.

As for the rule of thumb about 250 words per page, the average words/page in this spreadsheet is 246.4 (not shown). Different, and common, fonts and font sizes can vary the number of pages in your manuscript as much as 43% around that average.

Margins

Without changing anything in “how long” the manuscript is, I altered margins from manuscript format (1 inch) to the defaults of various word processors (1.25 or 1.5 inches) to measure margin’s impact on number of pages. I also considered a few popular fonts that produce about the same number of pages in the formatted manuscript.

The number of pages in the manuscript increases by an average of 11% if your word processor’s margins default to 1.25 inches, and by an average of 24% if your word processor’s margins default to 1.5 inches.

Formatting

Without changing anything in “how long” the manuscript is, I altered the formatting from traditional double-spaced lines and tabbed paragraphs to no formatting except paragraphs and tabs.

Within the unformatted manuscripts, the average number of words on a page varies from 414 to 545 – which is to say, a lot more than 250.

The number of pages varies between 173 and 228 – a 28% variance from the average number of pages – based only on font choice. These numbers are more dramatic, however, when compared to formatted manuscript:

Bottom line

The middle section of this spreadsheet – the white rows – is most compelling. If we look at the average number of pages in a formatted manuscript, considering various fonts and font sizes, and compare it to the average number of pages in an unformatted manuscript, considering various fonts (but not different font sizes), there is a 100% difference in the number of pages.

Two people talking about “how many pages” are in a manuscript may have a totally different interpretation of “how long” the manuscript really is.

Focus on the number of words in your work, not the number of pages.

The exception that proves this rule is that publishing pros – authors with multiple books and their agents, editors, and publishers – can shorthand “number of pages” because all of them operate on the industry-standard concept of a formatted manuscript.